May

Senior Wisdom: Tom Faure

No Spec means no QuickSpec. So this morning, Bwog gives you… FaureSpec? That’s quick-speak for the Senior Wisdom of former Spectator EIC, Tom Faure.

Name, School: Tom Faure, CC ’09

Claim to fame: Started with SEEJ, volunteered at Postcrypt Coffeehouse for a while, and was Spectator Editor in Chief after years covering student politics shenanigans. My claim to substantive relevance may be that I publicized, I think for the first time, what the hell [email protected] is. But my real claim to fame is I got this email from Bwog.

Post-grad plans: Three nouns and three adjectives that have yet to pair up: journalist, novelist, and philosopher; failed, freelance, and broke.

Favorite study spot: Some friends and I would shack up in Butler 303 for weeks, but camping is a little harder these days. Avery is nice, but inevitably the only place I get any work done is Butler 202.

What are three things you learned at Columbia?

1) In the words of Poor Tom’s a Cold: “The worst is not, So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.'”

2) I’d known the world was an infinitely complex puzzle beyond my full comprehension. What I never realized was how infinitely complex and interesting are the people that comprise that world. (Not to seem like a pedantic name-dropping twat, but Wittgenstein’s phrase, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world,” is basically the coda to my airhead liberal art studies. My addendum would be that the limits of my world mean the limits of my language. Good people can enrich one’s vocabulary.)

3) For my friends, with love and affection: Ballz.

Justify your existence in 30 words or less. I think that I, unlike some, generally admit to the possibility that I am wrong. I play blues guitar. I’m a lightweight, hence a cheap date. Ballz.

What was your favorite controversy in your time at Columbia? The Minutemen was too real, the hunger strike was too personal, the Madonna Constantine was too harrowing…I guess my favorite controversy, oddly enough, would be the very muted controversy that is the never-ending wasteland of Lerner 6.

Any battle wounds/war stories from the War on Fun? I went through the disciplinary process and received a warning, even though at the time of the “bust” there were really only about 10 people in my suite (and hundreds of empty beer cans…).

Would you rather permanently give up oral sex or cheese? As I am French I do not understand the distinction.

What do you wish you could tell the Class of 2013 before they come here?

Before getting here: enjoy yourself–Columbia parties generally suck. Once you get here: you don’t have to do the reading. While you’re here: I never fully recognized this until recently, but no matter how many responsibilities are on your plate, you can make time for what really matters to you. Finally: for God’s sake, whatever you do, nurture a hobby of some kind outside your academics. Read books for pleasure, volunteer, take up kite-flying, or grow illegal plants in your closet, but do something. Just kidding – no one reads books anymore.

Regrets? There are many things I wish had turned out differently, but I hold no concrete “regrets.” Except Roti Roll.

Excellent work, Tom. You will be missed here on campus. It is rather unfortunate, though, that a man of your wisdom and esteem can degrade himself to support two of the most reprehensible sports franchises on the planet, the Boston Red Sox and Manchester United.

A slightly better translation of Wittgenstein's line, "Die Grenzen meiner Sprache sind die Grenzen meiner Welt" would be "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." Assigning 'meaning' to the limits of language strikes me as problematic in this context. Nice inversion of the quote, though. You might be interested in reading Elisabeth Reichart, an Austrian author who titled a series of lectures on poetry "Die Grenzen meiner Welt sind die Grenzen meiner Sprache."